Edit: it cost $20 to join?! I’m out
Well, they need something to pay the lawyers with once Musk takes notice.
Edit: I've just discovered this interesting concept called "reading the article" and found out that they've already been sued, though it's still not entirely settled.
That's kinda nosense, but alright.
A project of this scope and available funding being completely frozen for 4 months (the article isn't new and as far as I could find out the submissions still aren't being accepted) does kind of sound like abandonment. Why are you certain it's not?
The only thing you listed that could be described as particularly inconsistent is spelling. But non-phonemic spelling is found in countless other languages and doesn't really hamper the language. It might even be helpful for languages with diverse accents. English could be revised on some points with no issue (, and some other cases), but overall it's functional.
As for the rest, I don't know how phonetics could be inconsistent. Like, is it inconsistent that frogs is pronounced as /frogz/, but clocks as /kloks/, so the -s plural ending is realised differently in different words? As for grammar, what about it? Do you think it's unusual for a language to have "irregular" forms such as buy-bought rather than *buyed? Tons of languages have them, I doubt if there's any without "irregularities" at all.
(Note: syntax is a part of grammar.)
Viewing these things as a shitshow, as something particularly negative or even harmful, is literally anti-scientific.
What is the thing that's supposed to happen? You said English already is a 'shitshow' (not a thing that could've happened in our lifetime, but long ago), but it isn't a shitshow, and that's what I responded to, so you're moving the topic here.
So yeah, you haven't really responded to the statement that your position is elitist, or at least smartassery that no linguist actually supports.
maybe it was proposed because ‘ё’ denotes a very particular sound?
Indeed. And then it wasn't made generally mandatory, and then the Russian language continued to work fine.
Which, notably, Western languages can never quite approximate
Why would that be remotely notable here? We're talking about Russian spelling of Russian language.
perhaps because the letters are in a different position?
And what is that position that makes the difference?
Same city, Lvov is the Russian and Lviv is the Ukrainian name. Ukrainian has historically shifted many 'o's to 'i'.
Russian won't turn into a shitshow because of people not using ë, that's catastrophism. No language has turned into a shitshow, for that matter, English functions well too.
In no way am I elitist about it
I think that equating respect for language with usage of the letter and vague guilt-tripping of people who don't use it is elitist.
the replacement of ‘ё’ with ‘е’
It's the other way around, actually, 'e' is the original letter and sound, the sound changed by the 18th century or so (as far as I'm aware) and then the modified letter was proposed but never made generally mandatory. People aren't replacing anything, they're writing same as always.
‘его’ is at least a typical consistent rule, mapping to the pronunciation ‘ево’ in the same places in various words
The name Егор doesn't follow it, but моего and сегодня do. Why? You have to explain the etymology of сегодня at the very least to make sense of it, undermining the consistency.
If you had read books in Russian, you'd notice that basically no Russian writer after Karamzin (who IIRC proposed the ë letter himself) "respected" the Russian language enough to use the letter. It's legitimate for you to use it (all the better for me as a foreign speaker), but it's not something to act elitist about.
Whether Russian will go in the direction of English depends on how its pronunciation develops, for now it's still pretty close to the spelling, although there are words and forms such as "моего, сегодня" that are pronounced as "моево, севодня". I wonder how many people would support changing this spelling.
Elon Musk's AI-generated alternative to Wikipedia, lol
This here is an excellent guide: